


This is the Only Thing (I've Ever Had Any Faith In)

by thekingofcosmos



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), F/M, Fix-It, M/M, Minor Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, You bet we're fixing it, gratuitous usage of nicknames and the word “pal", lots of talking, some straight up technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 08:27:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18752683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekingofcosmos/pseuds/thekingofcosmos
Summary: “You look different,” Peggy tells him. “Older.”Steve shrugs.“I am older,” he says





	This is the Only Thing (I've Ever Had Any Faith In)

**Author's Note:**

> Joining in on the collective desire to erase the last 10 minutes of Endgame from existence by contributing yet another fix-it fic. This movie really pulled me out of fandom retirement, god.
> 
> Title is from "Grace" by Florence and the Machine.

Five seconds, Banner had said. He'll only be gone for five seconds.

It's at the eight second mark that Bucky starts to worry.

Standing in that clearing, waiting, it's impossible not to let the  _what ifs_  start running through his head, has been since Steve stepped on the platform if he's being completely honest with himself. What if something goes wrong? What if he gets hurt? God, they're messing with  _time travel_ here, who's to say any of this will go to plan, who's to say...

Who's to say Steve will choose to come back at all?

Given the chance between staying here with Sam, the remaining Avengers, and himself (the person he’s already done so much for, toomuch for) or having a life with Peggy Carter, a nice quiet life with a brilliant dame who loves him…well it’s not even a contest is it? What have they got to offer him that's better than that?

(What does Bucky have to offer him that's better than that?)

Banner is frantically poking around at the machine, trying to figure out if something’s gone wrong no doubt, Sam looks stricken with concern, and Bucky stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jacket, heart resting somewhere in his belly, already resigning himself to the idea that Steve isn’t coming back.

And then the machine powers up again in a sudden, deafening burst of blue light and sound, and there is Steve standing on the platform, looking much the same as he did when he disappeared a little under a minute ago. 

“Oh thank god,” Banner says, collapsing to the ground, at the same time that Sam throws his hands up with a “What the hell Cap?”

“What?” Steve says, looking around at them all, puzzled. There’s a certain sense of tiredness to him, visible in the low set of his shoulders, a deeper than normal crease under his eyes, but when they meet Bucky’s, the smile that tugs at his lips is familiar, genuine. He steps down from the platform. “Did you guys miss me that much? It was only five seconds, right?”

“Five seconds my ass,” Sam says, looking between Steve and Banner like he’s not sure who he’s supposed to be mad at here. “You were gone for almost a full minute.”

“Which doesn’t make  _sense_ ,” Banner says, rifling through pages on his clipboard. “Accounting for the time it should have taken for you to replace the stones, and converting that through the space-time disparity, it  _should_ have been about five seconds.”

“What’d you do, Stevie?” Bucky says. He’s been too caught up in the shock of seeing Steve again, just as he was preparing himself to let him go, to speak until now. But with every second that Steve spends standing in front of them—real and whole, and so very much himself—the more it sinks in that he really is back.

That at the end of it all, Steve chose to be  _here_.

A wave of something almost like giddiness washes over him, tugs a smile from his own lips, has him drawling like the blurred-out memory of a much younger version of himself. “You make a wrong turn at 2012 or something? You’ve always had the worst sense of direction, pal.”

Steve’s grin, if anything, gets wider. “Hey, I had to replace all six of those Infinity Stones by  _myself_ —”

“We literally  _offered_ —”

“Hey, Sam you got a minute?” Steve cuts in, turning away and Bucky rolls his eyes, but he knows it probably looks as fond as he feels. He kind of loves when Steve acts like a shit, and he’s pretty sure that Steve knows it too.

It turns out he does have a legitimate reason for pulling Sam aside though. Captain America’s shield—fixed now, thanks to Shuri and her team—suits him.

“I feel like this should be going to you,” Sam says, afterwards, standing next to Bucky while Steve helps Banner pack up the time machine. Maybe Bucky’s imagining things, but it feels like every time he glances over at them, Steve’s already looking his way. He has to force himself to stop looking (god Barnes, pull yourself together) and focus on what Sam’s saying to him.

"What, you think  _I_  should be the one carrying that thing?" he asks, nodding at the shield where it's strapped to Sam's arm. He's been running his fingers along the smooth metal, careful and reverent, since Steve gave it to him. Bucky shakes his head because yeah,  _definitely_ not.

“All that red, white, and blue isn’t really my style,” he says and Sam laughs.

“Yeah, honestly I don’t know if anyone can really pull it off besides Steve.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to try, Cap _._ ” Sam grins, bashful, and really, that expression alone is proof enough that he deserves the title.

Eventually they finish packing everything up. Sam offers to drive back with Bruce and all of their gear, leaving Bucky and Steve to head back up to Barton's house on foot. Bucky has a sneaking suspicion that he left them alone on purpose, but it’s not like he's upset about it. He doesn’t think he could ever get tired of having Steve’s attention to himself. He knows it’s selfish, but he also can’t help it.

There’s always been a part of him, since before the Winter Soldier, since before the war even, that’s craved Steve’s focus in a way that he knows is probably too much. He still remembers the odd, hollow sense of loss he felt when Steve first got the serum, and suddenly everyone else had wanted a piece of that attention too. He’s not sure if he’s ever quite gotten over it.

He’s thinking about all of this when he opens his mouth again, breaking the comfortable silence that’s fallen between them as they walk.

“You know,” he says, quiet. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back."

Steve looks glances over at him sharply. “You thought I’d choose to stay in the past?” He seems surprised, but Bucky can’t quite read his expression beyond that. 

He shrugs. “Well when you didn’t make it back in time…” he starts. “I thought maybe you'd decided to stay with Peggy Carter. Make a nice little life with her. It’s what you both wanted, right?”

Another, less comfortable moment of quiet, descends between them while Steve processes his words, the only sound coming from the crunch of fallen leaves under their boots. Bucky notes for the first time since he got back that it’s fall now; it was spring when they fought Thanos the first time, five years ago for Steve, and not even a full day for him. 

Time, he thinks, must really have something against them ‘cause she's been fucking with them for years.

“I did end up going back to see her,” Steve admits, at length. “I guess that’s part of why it took me awhile to get back? But it wasn’t—it wasn’t because I wanted to stay there with her. That would have been a crazy thing to do for  _so_ many reasons.” He chuckles, shakes his head.

“No, I just...I figured I owed her a dance.”

~*~*~*~

_New York, 1947_

They dance through two songs. The first is a slow brassy ballad, the second an up-tempo number that has them twirling across Peggy’s living room, both of them laughing because Steve still really isn’t that great of a dancer.

Afterwards, they sit beside each other on the front steps of her apartment building, sipping ice-tea in the familiar warmth of a June evening in old New York. It fills Steve with a sense of longing nostalgia, at the same time that it has him feeling vaguely unsettled by the overall quiet, the lack of giant shining billboards, of kids on skateboards, people tapping away on their phones. So many things he never expected to get used to, and yet here they are.

“You look different,” Peggy tells him. “Older.” Steve shrugs.

“I am older,” he says. He’s at least 12 years older than he was the last time she saw him, give or take 70-odd years. He’s barely looked at himself in a mirror over the last few days, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d aged him even more, if his face reflected all that his mind and his body have so recently been through.

The time heist. The fight with Thanos. Natasha’s funeral in New Asgard, followed by Tony’s a few days later. His trip through time to return all of the stones. It’s been a hell of a fucking week.

“And the other…you,” she says slowly. “The you that  _I_  knew, he’s—?”

“Frozen somewhere in the Arctic circle? Yeah.”

“But he’s alive?” Steve nods and Peggy takes a deep, long breath. Her hands shake for a moment around her glass, before they settle again.

“I think I need something stronger than this,” she says, mostly to herself. Steve can’t help laughing a little at that and she swats him on the shoulder, hard. “I’m not  _kidding_ , Steve,” she says, but she’s laughing a little too, though its tinged with a note of helpless disbelief. “God, this is. This is a lot to take in.”

“Don’t I know it,” he says. He’s  _lived_  all of this, and it still sounds like something out of a pulp novel or a science-fiction movie if he lets himself think about any of it for too long.

“So, he’s alive,” she says again. “But we can’t get him out?”

Steve shakes his head. “From what I understand, the technology you need to find me…him…and safely defrost him doesn’t exist. Not yet anyway.”

“I’ll talk to Howard about it,” she says. “We’ll see what we can do.” She reaches for her bag and pulls out a small notebook with the SSR logo pressed into the soft brown leather, and Steve rattles off the approximate coordinates for where he was found. With her and Stark both working on it, he doesn’t doubt that they’ll find a way to get him out far earlier than he did in his own timeline. He hopes beyond hope that he isn’t messing things up for them, creating some awful new consequence by telling Peggy all of this.

He thinks he gets it now, why time-travel was so damn hard for people to figure out; no one should be trusted with that much responsibility. And here Steve is probably making a giant mess of things.

Well, if he’s probably gonna screw it up anyway, he might as well go for broke.

“There’s something else you should know,” he says, and he tells her about HYDRA infiltrating SHIELD. 

By the time he's finished, Peggy looks ready to go out and fight them right then and there, despite the fact that she's barely even  _started_  SHIELD yet.

"I can't believe we let that happen," she says, furious. "All those people...and what they did to Sergeant Barnes." She looks at him. "Is he--?"

"He's a lot better now," Steve tells her, and it's true, thankfully. "It's still tough, but. He's okay." He thinks about their reunion after he came back from the snap, falling into each other’s' arms on the edge of the battlefield, bruised and teary eyed and clinging to each other like they were boys again. Their moments together since then have been impossibly brief, exhaustion, and grief, and the never-ending list of things that need to get done constantly keeping them apart.

It makes his fingers itch with the need to close the distance between them, to put a hand on his shoulder, pull him into a hug, to watch a smile curve over his lips. Something, anything, as long as its him.

"I'm glad," she says. "I know how much you care about him. I'm glad he's with you."

"Yeah," he says. "I am too," and god does he mean it.

"I'll stop them, Steve," she says, voice hard as steel, and he believes her. 

They sit together for a while longer and Steve thinks for a moment about what it would be like to stay here with her. To live out those idle fantasies he'd had about her once upon a time—being with her, marrying her. A house and a few kids. They'd fight together, take down HYDRA for good together, keep each other on their toes. It could be a good life.

But it's not his life. 

He thinks about the people he’s got waiting for him, back on the other side of all this. Sam, Bruce, Thor, Wanda, Clint, and the others.

(Nat, maybe, god,  _hopefully,_ if there’s any truth to what Schmidt told him on Vormir.)

Bucky, who time and circumstance has ripped away from him again and again, but who’s back now, back and waiting for Steve to come home.

This version of the past already has a Steve Rogers and it isn't him.

He gets to his feet, and Peggy follows suit, gathering up her things. As she stands, something slips out from between the pages of her notebook. Steve ducks down to pick it up before it slides off the stairs, realizes that it's a photo. He looks at it as he slowly gets back to his feet.

In the picture, Peggy is wearing a beautiful dress, laughing, a glass of wine in one hand. Howard is standing in front of her, also dressed up, hands thrown wide like he's in the middle of a story. There's another dark-haired man standing beside them, also laughing at whatever it is Howard’s saying. 

"Sorry,” Peggy’s saying, reaching for the photograph. “That's from a party Howard threw a few months ago for some bloody reason or another. You know how he is," she adds, but her voice sounds fond. Steve chuckles.

"Yeah," he says. He looks at the other man in the photo, tilting his head a little as he examines his face. "Who's he?"

“Oh." Peggy shifts her stance and if Steve didn't know any better, he'd say she looks a little flustered. "That’s Agent Sousa. We work together.” 

"Huh."

"What?" 

"Nothing," Steve says. He holds the photo out to Peggy and smiles. "He has a good face."

He'd thought the same thing earlier too, when he'd seen that same face framed on the desk in Peggy's office in 1970.

Peggy snatches the photo from between his fingers and tucks it back into her notebook. "Don't be daft," she says.

"I'm serious." He hesitates for a moment before continuing. "I'm sorry if I... I hope I haven't messed anything up by coming here..."

"Don't," she says, and he shuts his mouth. She takes another deep breath and looks him straight in the eye. "I'm glad that I got to see you. And I'm glad that I know he's alive and that we have a chance to save him. You don't need to comment on the rest of it. I'll figure it out."

Steve nods because yeah. That's fair.

They hug each other for a long time. When they separate, Peggy leans up and presses a brief kiss to his cheek. It feels like an ending, and it feels good to know that he doesn't regret it.

He's ready to move on. He thinks they both are.

"Do you know what, Agent Carter?" he asks, and Peggy's lips curve into that old smile that used to make him weak in the knees.

"What is it, Captain Rogers?"

"I think we'll be alright."

Peggy rolls her eyes. "You're from the future, Steven. Obviously," she says, and Steve laughs and laughs.

~*~*~*~

_2023_

"So, we danced," Steve says, pushing his hands into the pockets of his dark jacket. "And then we talked. And then I left."

"Just like that?" 

"Yeah," Steve says. "Just like that."

"So, you went back there, saw the lady of your dreams, and you're telling me you didn't think about staying with her?" Bucky still remembers the way they looked at each other all those years ago, knows he still has that compass with her picture in it. He knows he still cares about her.

“I didn’t belong there," Steve says simply. "I'm not that Steve anymore, and we both knew it. Staying there...c'mon Buck, you gotta know that wasn't even an option."

"Yeah, okay," he says, but his heart’s not all the way in it and Steve must be able to tell. 

He stops walking and Bucky stops walking too. The spot where they're standing is sunny, the trees thinner this close to the house, and when Steve looks at him, the light makes his eyes look very, very blue.

“I didn't belong there,” he says again. He shifts and Bucky's eyes are drawn down to where Steve is taking his hand out of his pocket and gently nudging his fingers against Bucky's left hand. Their fingertips brush, warm skin on metal that's far more sensitive on this new arm than it was on the old one, and Bucky swears he feels it like it’s his own flesh and blood when they touch.

"I belong here." Steve says, low, quiet in the space between them.  

"Oh," Bucky responds,  because  _something is happening here._ He curls his fingers a little and Steve doesn't move away. They both watch curiously (as if they aren't the ones  _doing_  it, god is this what Shuri means whenever she talks about toxic masculinity?) as their fingers and then finally their hands curl around each other, palm to palm, fingers interlaced.

"I belong here," Steve repeats, squeezing his hand.

"Okay," Bucky says, and carefully squeezes back.

“So,” he says, a little while later. They've started walking again, and even though they've let go of each other, they're walking close enough that their hands brush on nearly every step. It's so distracting that Bucky's almost tripped over his own feet twice. Christ, he’s embarrassing. “You gave Sam the shield…what are you gonna do now?” 

Steve tilts his head up, thinking.

“You know,” he says. “I’m not really sure yet. I don’t know if I can just abandon the fight altogether but.” He shrugs one shoulder, light and unburdened in a way that Bucky hasn’t seen in a very long time. “I think it might be okay for me to take a step back from it. See if there’s anything else I’m good at.”

“There’s plenty you’re good at, Stevie,” Bucky says. “Hey, when was the last time you drew something, huh?” Steve blinks, like he’s surprised Bucky would even remember that he did that.

“I... guess it’s been awhile,” he admits. “Would be nice to pick it up again.”

“Steve Rogers, Avenger-turned world-renowned artist. Has a nice ring to it,” he says and Steve laughs.

“I don’t know about all that,” he says, smiling that genuine smile, and Bucky thinks about how mad he would have been if he never got to see it again. 

Maybe it is selfish, he thinks. But. If Steve's gonna keep smiling at him like that well. Bucky's gonna let him, for as long as he can.

He tugs playfully at Steve's hand because  _apparently, he can do that now._ God, Steve better learn to just do everything one handed cause he's gonna have a hell of a time getting Bucky to stop, constant threat of falling over be damned. It’s worth it.

"We’ll figure it out," Bucky says, as they finally emerge from the forest, fingers laced together.  "We've got time."

**Author's Note:**

> The songs that Steve and Peggy dance to are the Duke Ellington and Joya Sherrill recording of "I'm Beginning to See the Light," and "The Mole" by the Harry James Orchestra. They do not dance to "It's Been a Long, Long Time" because I am bitter. 
> 
> Also yes, not only did Nat have a magical, metal af Asgardian funeral, but there's also a good chance of her coming back. Fix-it fic lads!


End file.
